Re: [gardeners] Still no frost!
Ron Hay (gardeners@globalgarden.com)
Sun, 03 Nov 2002 07:08:33 -0800
Good morning, Matt,
Yep, but that's ok. I just hope we don't get ANY frost this year in our
hunk of L.A. Last year, it was touch and go with the tropicals and
subtropicals. You should have seen us, outside at night, after work, in
a roaring Santa Ana, stringing little Christmas lights around our trees
to keep them from frost damage...while chilling ourselves to the bone!
All the citrus, the macadamia, tea tree and curry leaf trees survived in
grand style, but the one tree that we didn't cover, our coral tree, lost
all of its leaves and took weeks to recover. Oh, yes, our passion fruit
vine died back from the roof ridge beam of our house down to the rain
gutters, but came back like a champ, giving us about 500 lemon sized
passion fruits so far this year.
But frost is a worrisome thing for those of us who push the envelope of
what we can grow in Sunset Zone 18 (USDA zones are useless! People
allegedly in the same zone, 10 miles away, over on the coast, virtually
never have frost, nor do they ever get regularly over 100 in the summer,
as we in the San Fernando Valley do.)
Let's just have a nice "normal" rainy season: we received just a smidge
over 4" of rain last year during what should have been our rainy season.
Ron
Van Nuys, CA